NOTE: SpaceX says the test will be no earlier than Monday. SpaceX is gearing up for a crucial hot-fire test of its Falcon 9 rocket, a major milestone that could take place as early as Monday.
Now standing erect on Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the 15-story rocket is equipped with nine first-stage Merlin engines that will be ignited for 3.5 seconds, most likely creating a cloud and an acoustical rumble that could roll across the northern end of the Space Coast.
SpaceX will have a 12-hour window that opens at 8 a.m. on the Air Force Eastern Range, which is the network of ground stations that provide radar and optical tracking as well as range safety services for all hazardous operations at Cape Canaveral and NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Company officials say Saturday is the earliest date for the test, which will take place only after managers decide all systems are ready for the engine-firing.
The test is considered a critical milestone in the lead-up to the inaugural Falcon 9 rocket launch, which now is scheduled for no earlier than March 22. That date is the earliest possible date for the demonstration launch. It's more likely to take place in April.
The Falcon 9 will remain anchored to its launch pad during the static test-firing, which aims to confirm the operation of ground control systems and demonstrate flight-readiness in advance of the first launch.
Based in Hawthorne, Calif., Space Exploration Technologies -- SpaceX for short -- assembled the Falcon 9 rocket at complex 40, which is a former Air Force Titan rocket pad, in February.
The rocket stands 154 feet tall and is 12 feet in diameter. A Dragon spacecraft qualification unit is shrouded in the rocket's protective payload fairing.
The company holds several contracts to launch foreign government and U.S. Department of Defense satellites. NASA in 2007 also awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to launch 12 cargo missions -- and a total of 20 tons of supplies and equipment -- to the International Space Station.
The Falcon 9 and the Dragon also are expected to contend for commercial crew taxi services that will provide U.S. astronauts with round-trip passage to the station.
25 comments:
YES! That's what I'm talkin' about, Go baby, Hough-RAH.
Go Falcon 9!
Good luck to America's entreprenurial pioneers. Show them the future belongs not just to government contracts.
and to think they can do this for less than 5% of what NASA can do it for....
someone want to remind me again why shutting down another corporate welfare case is such a bad thing? you cry babies should be lobbying to get Space X to launch everything they've got from here- someone has to do it and since you may be needing a job in the very near future...
just sayin'...
Go Space X
Go away NASA
Amen, Mr. Smith!
"Good luck to America's entreprenurial pioneers. Show them the future belongs not just to government contracts."
Uhh, SpaceX would not exist without a government contract.
3 out of their five launches have been failures doing what NASA did 50 years ago.
Let's see. Falcon 1, ONE Merlin engine, 5 launch attempts, two of which were successful. Falcon 9, NINE Merlin engines. Given their track record with the Falcon 1, I wouldn't hold my breath for success trying to get NINE engines to perform without fail. They might work OK for 3.5 seconds on the ground, but let's see if it flies.
It soon will be a new day!
Someone want to explain to them best practice? Significant amount of cork and paint come off the vehicle last week and they can get it repaired and back at the pad? Remember, you get what you pay for... Ace Hardware in Cape Canaveral sold a bunch of paint last weekend!
Obama is going to look foolish if it fails. KA-Boom. There is a lot riding on this launch. Hey, I guess they can be over budget and behind schedule too, just like NASA. It is time to launch and show what you can do. It has been DELAYED long enough. Do you know 80% of NASA work is done by contractors? Well nothing has really changed since they will still be the boss man. Low orbit space ships is the way of the future - not.
You're right UR MAMA. Obama, Bolden and now NASA are committed to making SPACE X successful in order to validate their plan.
They will pour tons of money and help into making them work, no matter how bad their failures might be.
So much for saving money with a "commercial" service.
NASA has been significantly late and over budget which is a matter of history. The only American astronauts to die have been in NASA rockets. Give SpaceX a chance.
"Uhh, SpaceX would not exist without a government contract."
Actually, this is not factually correct. Yes, SpaceX is taking money in the form of the COTS contract to put up the Falcon 9, but the R&D to get the engines developed and to start building the rocket were done well before the contract with NASA was even inked.
Heck, I don't think SpaceX would have received the contract in the first place if they hadn't already bent metal and had at least made some launch attempts with the Falcon 1 rocket. The Falcon 1 was entirely done with private money and no government money was involved with that vehicle at all... at least beyond simply the "cash and carry". Yes, some DARPA money was involved there too.... but it certainly wasn't a cost-plus contract as is typical in the aerospace industry.
What SpaceX is doing here is more typical of the airline industry, where a customer (NASA in the case of the COTS contracts) puts in an order to either buy or lease the vehicle and that vehicle is built to a "standard" model that is then offered to the customer. When the VC-25's (Air Force One) were procured for the White House, they used a standard Boeing 747-200B air frame that was then customized for the needs of the President. The Air Force didn't go out and have that vehicle custom built from scratch.
The huge difference here between the Apollo/Gemini launches and the SpaceX Dragon capsule on a Falcon 9 is that a private individual can go to Elon Musk and sign a contract to "buy" a Falcon 9. If you went to ATK and asked to buy an Ares I rocket right now, they would laugh you out of their office. That would be like trying to buy an F-22 as a private citizen... assuming you could even buy it without guns or offensive military hardware.
Name one government agency that hasn't been over budget and late on projects. The only reason the private sector hasn't had astronaut fatalities is they haven't even attempted manned orbital flight. You might note that Rutan ( Spaceship 1&2)has had a fatality of a technician while ground testing.
The argument for the commercial boys is that they are supposed to be faster, better, cheaper, on time, on budget.
What's Space X's excuse?
Faster-Better-Cheaper. You can't have all three, pick any two.
COTS= Commercial Off The Shelf. This means you purchase an existing product, not give seed money to help develop. Yes, SpaceX started out with private money as funded by their mega rich owner and knowing that NASA would eventually subsidize them.
Did USAF give Boeing money to develop the 747?
There was/is no business case for a purely commercial launch provider. Ask Sea Launch how that worked out.
SpaceX can only survive with Government funding. Musk has deep pockets, but they do have a bottom.
I can see how the above poster could be confused, but they should check their facts before making their confusion public.
COTS in this context is for NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS), where they are buying the delivery services from companies using internally developed vehicles. Like a poster further up had already described very well, the money that NASA is paying Orbital & SpaceX is for them to demonstrate their ability to do something NASA specific, i.e. dock & delivery cargo to the ISS. Since there are no routine standards for this service, NASA is using part of the COTS funding to make sure that the suppliers can deliver their services in the manner that NASA requires. The poster above had a good example.
I was a manager at a company that received one of the first DOD COTS contracts, and COTS does not have to mean that you already have a product available for sale. In our case we were building a product to meet a DOD requirement, and then making that product available for any branch of the DOD who needed it. NASA is really doing the same thing, in that after Orbital and SpaceX have been certified to deliver cargo to the ISS, anyone could contract with them to delivery cargo to the ISS (and future stations). That opens up the market to large companies or educational cooperatives to start utilizing the ISS, which means it can be more fully utilized, and provide a larger return on our already spent tax dollars.
Yu are smoking crack my friend. please have another glass of koolaid as well.
Blah, blah, a simple shifting of government funding from the aerospace mafia to an upstart company, all in the name of "commercial" outsourcing. Like previously posted, NASA will subsidize SPACEX, Orbital, and whomever else to death in order to save face. Helping upstarts learn how to do what NASA did 50+ years ago. Progress, Hah.
What is most concerning is this, history shows that all new launch vehicles have gone through a development curve. Typically starting out about 50-60% reliable and improving from there. If you gain help from previous development, sometimes you skip the early part of the curve - Atlas and Shuttle are examples. Orbital has been paying its dues for going alone (check its fleet reliability) and are probably on the verge of the curve knee at about 96%. SpaceX is "going it alone" also, and you can expect the same curve. Falcon 1 failures will help build reliability into Falcon 9. Nothing against either company, its just a hard business. By the way, once you remove the emotion of people being killed, the Shuttle compares favorably with other launch vehicles in terms of reliability in completing its mission (97.6%-Shuttle, Soyuz U-97.2%, Taurus XL -70%, Falcon 1-34% based on Bayesian analysis for probability of success). Unfortunately we can expect future loss of life in the space industry. With current chemical rockets having to achieve tremendous acceleration/velocity with huge amounts of stored energy, the 100% reliable launch vehicle is a myth.
"Commercial Space" is based on the assumption (as a previous post notes) that once NASA uses the vehicles, many others will as well and off-set NASA's cost. There is no current business model that truly supports that notion. It's a "field of dreams" approach - build it and they will come.
Airplanes, which are a more mature industry in a less challenging environment still lose lives each year.
Balderdash, the reliability rate you cite is relative to when the technology envelope was pressed. In other words, the failure rate is higher when you are doing things that nobody has done before. SpaceX? Big dumb rocket,with low performing kerosene/Lox engines. Been done 50 years ago. They also have the benefit of the lessons learned, as NASA's failures and corrective actions are all in the public domain.
Let's see the Falcon 9 perform.
NASA, formed in 1958, utilized existing ICBMs (Titan, Atlas, Delta, etc)produced by the military.
AFAIK, the only boosters created for NASA were Saturn (from Von Braun at Redstone Arsenal), and the Shuttle.
Certainly, no one still at NASA has ever designed/built a booster.
After 5 years of work, NASA Constellation Ares effort was years behind schedule, and $billions over budget when it was canceled. For example, NASA was spending $1.2 billion just on a slightly improved J-2x engine.
SpaceX has designed/built new engines, 2 new boosters (Falcon 1/9), and a new spacecraft (Dragon) for perhaps $200 million, in only 5 years from scratch.
There will be failures of Falcon, just as there have been in every booster project.
However, somehow, we must make a big reduction in the cost of spaceflight, either through private innovation, or through new technology.
"The only American astronauts to die have been in NASA rockets." Concidering the only American Rockets that are manned are "NASA". This may be true, but take a look at how many Russian Cosmonauts never made the full round trip, we're doing just a bit better.
Make solar energy not drilling for oil. Oil pollutes and there isn't enough to meet our energy needs. Use the technical skills of the soon to be unemployed Kennedy Space Center workers to build solar panels for every building in the SUNSHINE STATE. Tell the State Representatives to bring Solar Energy jobs to Brevard not oil wells to the Gulf of Mexico as proposed by the State Rep from Apopka.
Don't be mean-Go Green!
Continue to lobby the Federal Government for US Space Flights. If Alex Sink's former bank can be bailed out,why not the Kennedy Space Center?
HELP? Our beaches will not be polluted like the Gulf will from oil drilling. Our way of life will be destroyed from KSC unemployment and its trickle down effect on Main Street,real estate and our economy.
HELP! Bernanke had to beg. Are we too proud to beg? It's our tax money. Use it to help us in Brevard, We want rockets or at the least solar panels. The government wants trains for Tampa and Orlando and maybe Miami. What about Brevard?
Northern Brevard will be the hardest hit by the Kennedy Space Center unemployment. Why is all our county tax money spent on pristine Lily White Viera? If the state capital can be on the Georgia border, why can't some more county buildings be in North Brevard? Stop building in Viera. Build in the North.
I just wanted to throw out there that the Falcon 9 has never successfully completed a test. The Ares rocket has already had flawless hot-flame tests and has flown. One rocket works, one doesn't.
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